Two Poems in Conversation
David Keplinger's Sleepwalking & Henry Crawford's Four Small Stories
Some poems speak to each other. None more deeply than between mentor and student. Back in the 2010s, I was writing a lot of computer code as a professional software programmer. It was then that I began writing little poems onto the test screens of my web projects. It was also when I first encountered David Keplinger who was teaching poetry at the Writer’s Center. He has been my mentor and friend ever since.
Recently, while getting ready for a little workshop with David, I went back to one of my favorite Keplinger poetry collections: The Most Natural Thing. This is a work of beautifully exotic and hauntingly mysterious prose poems. But what jumped out at me was how much this work has been an influence on my own poems. Maybe it’s because he was actually working on these poems as he was leading our workshops at a private home on Surrey Street in Friendship Heights. Who knows? But the poems of The Most Natural Thing taught me the art of making magical little boxes filled with far flung remnants of the imagination. There is a part of David’s voice that is rooted in all my work.
So this week, while working on a host of projects, I found a little time to record a poem from The Most Natural Thing and place it alongside a reading from my first collection which I wrote during those years, American Software. Mentor and student, in conversation.
Sleepwalking
Here’s a Keplinger poem from The Most Natural Thing that wraps itself around the spiritual, material, and familial aspects of contemporary life while addressing the overall anxiety of being. I added a percussive soundtrack that I think compliments the beat of the poem.
Practicing the agony’s grammar, yes, thank you David Keplinger.
Four Small Stories
This poem could not have been written without the experience of working with Keplinger and the Surrey Street poets. As always, even back then, I was experimenting and wanting to express some of the paradox of ordinary people in a world that they cannot imagine, even as they are living it. For a backing track, I used Franz Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat major, which was popularized in modern film by Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. It’s an easy grab for a melodramatic mood, but why not?
The poem is over 10 years old now and I’m still trying to work out the relationships between the characters!
Here’s a link to David Keplinger’s wonderful Substack. He has a lot going on there, check it out.
Coming Up
Sojourn with Words. Sistah Joy Alford has a YouTube channel archive of her Sojourn with Words programs. Here’s a link to the channel. She invites poets of all ages and locations interested in being a guest poet on the show to email her with a few samples of writing.
Monday, May 5, 2025, Café Muse will feature poets Suzanne Suzanne Frischkorn and Ae Hee Lee. Register to get the Zoom link. Register for the Zoom list early since Zoom links cannot be distributed at the real time event.
Saturday, May 17, 2025, Gaithersburg Book Festival.
Have a reading or event coming up? Let me know and I’ll pass it along. And as always, feel free to email me with questions or comments at henrycrawfordpoetry@gmail.com. Use the subject “Coming Up” Stay creative!
If you’d like me to list an upcoming poetry event in Everyday Poet, please let me know by emailing me at henrycrawfordpoetry@gmail.com. Use the subject: “Coming Up”.